(Photo: Richard Hubert Smith)

A new production of Wagner’s “Parsifal” is always a big deal, given the imaginative and actual scale of the work and the special aura that surrounds it – a triumph of Bayreuth marketing, truly, to try and restrict its performances for so many years. But this new staging at Glyndebourne Festival Opera signals the first time it has ever been mounted in sunny Sussex, given added significance by the fact that both “Meistersinger” and “Parsifal” were the apple of John Christie’s eye when he set up the Festival back in the thirties. On top of this, it is Dutch director Jetske Mijnssen‘s UK debut. Given Music Director Robin Ticciati’s triumphant forays into “Tristan” in 2021 and 2024 – incredibly, his first foray into the composer’s work – expectations couldn’t be much higher. 

The work’s heightened atmosphere and symbolic density – Wagner called it “a festival play for the consecration of the stage,” setting it even further apart from the ‘normal’ operatic repertoire – sees directors often bring hefty conceptual armature along. Calixto Bieito’s production of the piece for Stuttgart (lately revived) sees the work as a post-apocalyptic meditation on humanity’s desperate yearning for redemption, drawing on Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and images of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, as well as giving Klingsor a Mad Max-esque flamethrower. Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s celebrated staging imagines it as a modernist existential parable, informed by Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot. Stefan Herheim’s masterful mounting of the work at Bayreuth unravelled the work’s obsession with redemption as an allegory for the horrors of modern German history itself. 

Mijnessen’s vision is no less bold than these, though cast on quite a different scale, tailored to the intimacy of the Sussex house, and providing a familial and domestic rather than cosmic frame for the music drama. During the overture, the curtain rises briefly to reveal a bed-ridden Amfortas in a late-nineteenth century bourgeois home; when it falls, we are given a portentous quotation from the story of Cain and Abel. In Mijnessen’s production “Parsifal” is a family drama – the backstory, relayed by child actors on a bed of delphiniums upstage in Act one, that Klingsor and Amfortas are in fact brothers, and not just knights from the same order. The spear – a whittling knife – turned on Amfortas in a childish fight over Kundry. Amfortas’ irreparable wound is a sickness at the heart of the bourgeois family itself, underneath whose proper surface – this world of knights, nannies, and maids – roils intense currents of rage, jealousy and desire. 

It’s not the first time Wagner has been cast on a Chekhovian scale – one recalls the family drama of Kaspar Holten’s “Ring” for the Royal Danish Opera. There are shades, perhaps, of Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” in Kundry’s care for Amfortas, perhaps hinting at some syphilitic resonance to the wound that afflicts Amfortas, born of a sexual transgression (the play premiered the same year as “Parsifal”). The action of all three acts takes place in one room, set in the period of the opera’s creation, with a vaulted ceiling and stuffy wooden shutter, in Ben Baur’s set. We drift from a mostly naturalistic environment – the Grail is a simple chalice, the bread and table recognizable from any parish Eucharist – into more dreamlike territory. 

The Flower Maidens are all doppelgangers of Kundry, who eerily pursue the hero around the shadowy stage, in a brilliant feat of blocking; Parsifal’s mother appears on a bed on a strange rocky mound, surrounded by bare, lifeless branches, during Kundry’s narration in Act two. By Act three we are brought back down to earth and earthly agony, Amfortas writing in the bed (Mijnssen cleverly turns the text back to Amfortas here), and the trappings of the Grail house have been stripped away even further; a portrait of Christ turned to face the bare brick walls. Klingsor and Amfortas are given ancient doppelgangers, who drift around rather listlessly.  

Compassion is at the heart of “Parsifal,” and Mijnssen has an unconventional approach to realizing it in the drama, though one that is deeply compelling and, at the conclusion, profoundly moving on its own terms. Instead of tearing down Klingsor’s castle at the end of Act two, after a brief tussle Parsifal takes him into his arms, with the implication in the following Act being that Klingsor has joined him on his endless travels. It paves the way for his presence at Amfortas’ side on his deathbed, the brothers reconciled as he dies, surrounded by his family; it stands in stiff contrast to the bullying, cold presence of Titurel, whose is imposingly present throughout the first Act, observing the action with a kind of futile despair in a remarkable performance from John Tomlinson, who is onstage for eighty minutes before he sings a note. 

Allowing Amfortas to die so loved, draws out some deep, mysterious tenderness in Wagner’s music; so too the beautiful sequence in Act three where Parsifal washes Kundry’s feet after she has done so to him. The meaning of the whole ritual of the Grail changes when Parsifal promises that it will no more be hidden at the conclusion of the piece – no longer a tool of Patrician cruelty wielded by Titurel, or the bully boy choristers who give Parsifal a beating at the end of Act one. Instead what is released is the guilt, shame, and recrimination that binds and shatters families by turns. 

Wagner purists will disagree with Mijnssen’s narrative tinkering, I’m sure, and there is no doubt that this interventionist approach makes a rather mystifying work hard to read for first timers unused to playing conceptual three-dimensional chess with Wagner and his bookshelf. But what would it mean to be so blindly faithful to a work that, at bottom, so clearly ironizes empty ritual and zealotry? Wagner can certainly take it. That said, some decisions remained puzzling and a couple of key moments fell flat. The ravishing transformation music in Act one calls for more than mere scenery shifting, though the candles used onstage were beautifully executed, painstakingly extinguished as the Act wound down (a triumph there, and elsewhere, by Fabrice Kébour). 

It might be to Mijnssen’s credit that she lets the theatre of the imagination take over, but Wagner did – in 1882 – offer the remarkable innovation of a new scrolling backdrop and travelator that transformed the scene before the audience’s eyes. The climax of Act two also fell short, the simple brawl offering too little feeling of transformation. “With this sign I banish your magic,” Parsifal exclaims in triumph, yet seemed to offer no such thing – if it was the hug of reconciliation that followed, then we needed something with a far greater physical or theatrical pay off to seal the deal. Act two also offered some rather mysterious blocking, with Parsifal drifting into dark spots upstage behind the rock that took his reactions out of the light – critical, given that it is his identification with Amfortas, and the culmination of Kundry’s story, that changes the course of the plot. 

All this being said, it’s still a thoroughly absorbing production and an offering that feels distinctive and idiosyncratic. Musically, it is incandescent, with voices well-matched to the size of the house and an orchestra under meticulous dynamic control, with transparency and detail a priority. Daniel Johansson takes the title role. I’m not completely sold on him as an actor – some of the key gestures, including a pivotal refusal of the bread and wine in Act one, felt misjudged – but vocally there was a superb balance of power and control, heft and line, with a fine calibration between the darkness of Kaufmann and a more pointed, pinging brightness; the latter did much to bring the role to life. Singing in the second act was ardent and generous, with a sensuality that contrasted well with the more bullish moments of the act before. 

Audun Iverson’s Amfortas is grounded on an absorbing physical performance, making excellent use of a wheelchair and stick that is reflected in agonised singing that is profoundly affecting. His long Act one monologue is tender and breathy, with a quiet intensity; the conclusive peroration in Act three is thrilling, charismatic, and desperate, the top notes a great thing to behold. Kristina Stanek’s Kundry wobbles a little above the stave – the tessitura of the role remains unforgiving – but she has a dark authority and glint in the voice that reflects a certain toughness this character has had to find; in Act two, with her seduction of Parsifal, she was a rich and compelling vocal force, and her ‘Lachelt!’ had real expressionistic force and texture. 

John Relyea doesn’t flinch as Gurnemanz in delivering the epic Act one narration despite having to do it under the gaze of one of the finest exponents of the role in modern times; his diction is crisp and phrasing mobile, and keeps the piece from sliding into longueurs with over-indulgent singing. John Tomlinson, now into his eight decade and still treading the boards, gives an astonishing physical performance that is a fine lesson in stagecraft to the youngsters in the chorus. Vocally, he is far less burnished than in days gone by – who wouldn’t be? – but marshals his resources to brilliant dramatic effect, adopting a raw, pure tone when he finally comes in that is shot through with bullying malice. Ryan Speedo Green brings a steely, ringing sound to Klingsor, with an oily legato that chills and seduces by turns; the top notes in his summons at the top of Act two were especially thrilling; pity Kundry was only bringing him coffee. 

Ticciati surpasses himself, though his handling of the score is less electric than his Tristan last summer, with the foot slightly off the gas, though never ponderous. Again, his brilliance in the French repertoire tailors the performance to the generous and responsive acoustic of the house, with especially fine playing from the London Philharmonic Orchestra strings, who at times are bathed in light, with a Debussyian shimmer and glow. Act two – especially the culmination – is a bit less wild than one might expect, though its chamber-like moments and sighs earlier on are beautifully shaded. There is plenty of room for outstanding woodwind solos, especially from clarinets, with Ticciati drawing lines from the texture with remarkable care. 

The nature of Mijnssen’s staging meant that much of the chorus singing took place offstage, creating an incredibly haunting effect; the shouts to rouse Amfortas in the final scene, coming from disembodied voices, were extraordinarily effective – perhaps this is all just his dying hallucination? The male voices in particular were lustrous and bronzed; the Flower Maidens and their cohort of choristers gilt-edged and nimble. It’s a production with a strong flavour, which won’t be for everyone, but by turning from convention makes a huge impact, and feels right for the house; musically it can hardly be faulted.